Today in my therapy session my counselor asked me about my atheism. Specifically, if i felt like maybe religion might be something that was an avenue to explore, or whether it was in my past and that i’m settled on being atheist. I told her about how i used to be a zealous evangelical Christian in my teens, then gave that up when too many doubts compounded faith into an untenable mess; and how since then i’ve explored everything from Buddhism to the occult, and found that literally no religion on Earth has ever filled in enough gaps in my doubt that it could ever be a worthwhile position.
I also told her about this image, which for me signifies exactly why no religion makes so much more sense to me than any religion ever could:
I told her that the image exemplifies to me the idea that either:
- god doesn’t exist
- god exists, but doesn’t care
- god exists, but is powerless
- god exists, but isn’t omniscient
- god exists, but is a huge fucking monster
…and that every single religious text has god depicted as monstrous numerous times over various parables. It just makes no sense at all to me. Why would anybody want to follow a jealous, absurdly abusive bully? And anyway, (to paraphrase the great Trae Crowder) we know why the sun moves across the sky; we know what germs are. We figured it out. All that old religious stuff is caveman nonsense that only serves to keep people separated, guided by fear, distrust, and hatred, and united only in violence toward each other. All gods are merely war mascots.
She asked me if i felt better before my atheism or after, and i said that i felt so much better giving up on blind belief in unknowable things like the afterlife and gods. I felt like all the weight of doubt was lifted, because i no longer had to carry it around like an albatross around the neck of faith. I feel so much freer now that i don’t have to believe in things which make no sense and are so frequently contradictory to both itself and the rational empirical world of observable reality.
I thought i’d write this down because although i am certainly angry about the whole rip-off of death, and the fact that people, in the year 2016, can’t seem to abandon their old outdated ideas about life enough to move forward into a peaceful future of love and unity, i’ve honestly never felt more honest and real and mentally together since i became a full-time atheist, compared to when i believed in things which were completely based on wishful thinking.
I do think it’s time we took responsibility for ourselves and stopped relying on an absent imperceptible supernatural parental figure. We have so much work to do to get our shit together, and we’ll never get it done if we just keep on waiting for some invisible sky-monster to force us to get it together for us. It’s way, way past time we started moving beyond our primitive thinking about causality and took an active role in getting ourselves into a better, safer, happier place. We owe it to civilization and the human race to try to build ourselves a much better future than we’ve been sitting around waiting to get handed to us.
